Responsive Personnel Employee Celebrates 20 Years in Recruitment

20 years ago today I started work in recruitment. How times have changed…

I remember when recruitment involved; 

• Checking the answerphone when you got to the office for any overnight calls
• Putting the A Boards outside the office for jobseekers to see as they walked the streets 
• Posting new jobs in the agency window and thinking of new ways to keep them interesting
• Writing lineage Ad’s for the local newspaper for “Job Day” and waiting for the phone to ring
• Rewinding the answerphone cassette 
• Shutting the desktop PC down, and leaving it in the office!

With the advances in technology, it has dramatically changed the way we work. We now have;

• Mobile phones with instant voicemails and text messages 
• Laptops we can take home with us 
• Online job board websites, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to tell the world our every move, achievement and thought
• Zoom / Teams / FaceTime to meet people face-to-face, but not quite literally. 

Progress? In part, maybe.

I think whilst the mobile world and its multiple ways of staying in touch has its benefits, it also has its darker side when a candidate can “suddenly” need to know the value of their holiday pot at 01:43 on a Wednesday, or a client emailing on a Sunday evening to reschedule all the interviews you set up for Monday morning!

Having worked through Booms and Crashes; extensions to the EU opening the market to a larger workforce and more recently BREXIT and COVID-19, one thing is for sure, and that is recruitment doesn’t sit still. It’s constantly changing and developing. 

Candidates will still find a way to let you down, just when you think it’s “in the bag” and you will come away from a client visit believing “you’ve nailed it”.

There are the days when you just want to scream and wonder why you ever got out of bed.

But then there are the days when it all goes to plan.

The client says “YES”.  The candidate says “YES”.   You punch the air and say “YESSSS”!

And it is for all these reasons it has keep me captive for so many years.

Since being part of setting up Responsive Personnel back in 2013, I have seen many changes here too.  

We’ve come a long way from the first day of simply a blank canvas and a business plan.  We’ve outgrown our first two offices, had some faces come and go and developed a number of great relationships with the clients and candidates who we work so well with today.

I wonder what the next 20 years will hold…

For further information about Responsive Personnel please visit their website here.